Alderaan said:

Akton said:

And yet the space battles in SW were shot and edited to emulate WWII dogfight footage... precisely because Lucas wanted an element of dynamic realism that had never been seen in a sci fi film before.

The new stuff is simply following that philosophy with modern filmmaking tools...

The dogfights were effective because of the editing, not the camerawork.

What an odd thing to say. It's both-and, not either/or. The editing was great, but it's not like it came to the rescue of boring, static camerawork. Remember the camera diving into the trench?

But all of this skirts the issue that the philosophy that gave us those dogfights was to add as much documentary-like realism to the space battles as possible. Lucas made no bones about the influence his background in shooting documentaries had on the making of Star Wars.